Posts in Category: Flemish
Ambrosius Benson
Ambrosius Benson, c 1495 – 1550, was an Italian-born painter who worked in Bruges. He entered the Bruges painters’ guild in 1519 and worked for a time in the workshop of Gerard David.
Benson established a successful workshop and served several terms in the administration of the Bruges guild. He painted religious subjects, portraits, and scenes of music and courtly company, and his sons Willem and Jan also became painters.
Benson remained active in Bruges until his death in 1550. His work is held by collections including the Groeningemuseum, National Gallery, Louvre Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Saint Louis Art Museum.
Pieter Pourbus
Pieter Pourbus, c 1523 – January 30, 1584, was a Flemish painter, draftsman, and cartographer. He was probably born in Gouda and settled in Bruges by the early 1540s. He became a master in the Bruges Guild of St Luke in 1543 and married Anna Blondeel, daughter of the painter Lanceloot Blondeel.
Pourbus painted portraits, religious works, altarpieces, allegorical subjects, and civic commissions. His work is associated with the Bruges tradition of detailed Netherlandish painting, adapted to mid-sixteenth-century portraiture and religious imagery. He also produced maps and topographical works, including important cartographic commissions for the region around Bruges.
Pourbus’s pupils and workshop connections included his son Frans Pourbus the Elder, who continued the family’s painting tradition. His works are held by the Groeningemuseum, Bruges; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum Gouda; The Wallace Collection, London; Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp; and other public and private collections.
David Teniers the Younger
David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) was the most versatile and prolific member of a Flemish dynasty of painters. Born in Antwerp, he became a master of the city’s Guild of Saint Luke in 1632–1633 and married Anna Brueghel, daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder, in 1637.
Teniers painted peasant interiors, tavern scenes, village festivals, guardrooms, alchemists, physicians, landscapes, religious pictures, portraits, and mischievous monkey scenes known as singeries. His sharp observation, small scale, and lucid handling made everyday life in the Southern Netherlands an international commodity.
From 1651 he served Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in Brussels as court painter and keeper of the Archduke’s great collection of Italian pictures. He later published its engraved catalogue, Theatrum Pictorium, in 1660—an important early model of the illustrated collection catalogue.
